NoSQL - what's the big deal

**LondonManc** · 8 February 2016, 14:44

That's like saying a truck is better than a car because it can carry more but not giving a qualification of the intended usage of the vehicle.

NoSQL isn't generically better than relational; it's very much use-case driven.

Three years ago I heard someone declare that the enterprise data warehouse is dead because they were using federating software. Absolute poppycock. EDW is dead if you've got a federating software vendor with better incentives/lower costs than the EDW quote.

**MicrosoftBob** · 8 February 2016, 15:34

I thought NewSql was the next big thing, to address the failings of NoSql by adding ironically things like support for transactions, sql queries, joins is suiddenly a fundamental requirement again

**MacContractor** · 9 February 2016, 08:22

I'd personally say that data persistence is very much going to be a mixture of both in the future, choosing the right tool for the job and as has been said, that'll be decided on a case by case basis.

Good to have had some exposure to the various kinds of NoSQL DB's just to know when it might be possible to consider using them, but I don't think you have to become and expert just yet!

**FrontEnder** · 9 February 2016, 08:59

No SQL is better because then I can refer to the DBAs as "Mongos" without getting the boot.

**CompulsiveArsonist** · 10 June 2016, 09:11

I worked at a clientco on an e-commerce site when MS Azure was new, the dev lead decided for some reason that rather than go down the traditional route of having a relational database we should use Azure's key/value store

If you knew the key you wanted to retrieve it was OK, but for any querying operations it was a nightmare and 90% of what we were doing was querying

The last I heard was that the project was scrapped and the client went with magento instead

**DimPrawn** · 10 June 2016, 09:28

This might sound obvious, but noSQL is very good when the data isn't highly relational and there's a lot of it.

So examples where I have used it include timeseries data. For example stock prices aren't really related, they are a set of values against a timestamp, one follows the other in time.

SQL is greate for relational data, so customers - products - orders - order items - shipping data for Ecommerce is a good fit, since you will likely be querying across lots of different relationships.

**MrMarkyMark** · 10 June 2016, 10:04

Originally posted by NorthWestPerm2Contr View Post

Recently got a lecture on how noSQL is far better than relational databases and that it must be the model we adopt in our development. The guy who came to me for a technical solution rated the guy quite highly but he just appears to be a geek with no business sense and no commercial experience. I gave as good as I got and the guy couldn't really respond.....

Of course you did Tiger, I suspect he was dazzled by your natural brilliance in something you know nothing about

I thought you were off to Greece

**LondonManc** · 10 June 2016, 10:52

Originally posted by FrontEnder View Post

No SQL is better because then I can refer to the DBAs as "Mongos" without getting the boot.

I do anyway. HTHBIDI

**SpontaneousOrder** · 14 June 2016, 15:19

Comparing RDBMS with NoSql is like comparing horses with reptiles. And NoSql platforms have been pretty mainstream for a good while now. And no, relational DBs won't be going anywhere.

What would be good though, is to understand both (the NoSql flavour may vary more than the relational - but a general appreciation will do) so that when someone needs new data storage you know if going relational is shooting yourself (or your client I suppose) in the foot or not.

There are lots of times when, for example, a graph database would be a perfect fit and going with relational just makes everyone want to kill themselves.

NoSQL - what's the big deal